BBC uses launch of Pope’s Latin twitter site as an excuse to attack him again

By Deacon Nick Donnelly, on January 22nd, 2013

David Willey, the BBC’s Vatican correspondent, has used the launch of Pope Benedict’s Latin twitter site to attack him for ‘poor communications’.

David Willey writes:

‘Pope Benedict’s papacy has been bedevilled by poor communications. Embarrassing clarifications had to be issued over such thorny issues as his 2005 speech about Islam and violence, and his stance on condoms and HIV.’

David Willey is well-known for his snide put downs, innuendo, and outright prejudice against the Holy See and Catholic Church in general. Here’s an example of his sarcastic reporting:

‘As the Pope launched his account last month, a spokesman said the pontiff would “reach out to everyone”. So far, the Pope’s accounts @pontifex – which mean “pontiff” or “builder of bridges” – are only following each other.’

Protect the Pope comment: BBC journalists use the much vaunted journalistic principle of ‘balance’ to slip in attacks on Pope Benedict and the Catholic Church, no matter the news story they are covering about the Holy Father. It is obvious to everyone who cares about good reporting of the Church that the BBC has an editorial policy of portraying Pope Benedict and the Catholic Church in a bad light as often as possible.

Well, the poor kid now has to consult a dictionary to grasp the papal tweets.
Of course he’s upset. It’s not like msm journalism has anything to go with research any longer.
Copy and paste Latin? Nope!

The report is certainly in the BBC’s slightly snide “house style”, but I am not convinced that the tone would be any different if they had been reporting the launch for a twitter feed by lets say David Cameron or Nick Clegg.

Last month the Pope gave a speech to the diplomatic corps of the Holy See.Reuters wrote that the Pope in the speech said that “same sex marriage is a threat to humanity”. The news was false as The Guardian ( even the Guardian !) reports. Much of the Italian media though bought into it and gave it as true without any control whatsoever. Rome’s La Repubblica website had it the whole day as one of its main stories ( no sort of apology was given when it became apparent that the news was false. They just deleted it from the website. On their websites,together with the news, there was also a short video of Ms Concia, an Italian-left wing politician who said that “the Pope foments omophobia” And there were no apologies from her either”. The newsreader of the news evening edition of RAI 3 , Rai’s notorious left-wing channel, said “He EVEN definied them a threat against humanity” Well,she could have spared that “Even” as the Pope never made that statemente anyway…. And the former editor of Rai’s all news channel RaiNews24 Corradino Mineo( he quit his job two weeks ago and he is now a candidate to Parliament with the center-left coalition , representing his region of Sicily, and that says a lot about politics and the media in Italy) so when he still was RaiNews24 editor and he used to present the news in the evening, he asked the Pope on air “to be open ” because “fundamentalism is dangerous” . He never apologized for this blunder, neither as a former RaiNews editor nor as a current politician , and neither did the channel.
And here the Guardian article,which says the truth about that speech. If the Italian journalists I’have mentioned can’t read English, they could at least have read the Pope speech, which by the way was in Italian, before giving skewed news, and even commenting on it